In equipment, there is often a passageway in a housing. This passageway can receive a member. One of the pieces of equipment which has a housing with a passageway for receiving a member is the yoke of a universal joint.
Universal joints are used in many forms of machinery such as farm equipment, tractors, automobiles, pickups and trucks, earth moving equipment and construction equipment.
The universal joint comprises a yoke which has two spaced-apart arms for receiving ends of a cross or ends of a cross member. In each of the spaced-apart arms, there is a passageway. In this passageway, there is positioned a cup which surrounds the end of the cross or the cross member. The cup houses bearings and is for receiving grease. There are two yokes in a universal joint.
Such equipment is most of the time used in the open or out-of-doors. An example is a truck or a crawler tractor. A truck such as a heavy-duty dump truck and a crawler tractor are often exposed to the elements such as dust, dirt, water, snow, mud, heat, chemicals on the road and the like. As a result, extraneous material becomes lodged between the passageway in the passageway of the yoke and the cup for receiving part of the cross of the universal joint. In time, the cup and the yoke tend to fuse together or bond together.
It is often necessary to separate the cross of the universal joint form the yoke. In those instances where there has been extraneous material deposited between the cup and the yoke, it is often difficult to remove the cup from the passageway in the yoke. For small universal joints, the removal of the cup can be done with a hammer or a pounding instrument and a rod. The cup can be pounded out of the passageway or forced out of the passageway.
For larger universal joints, it can be very difficult to remove the cup from the passageway in the yoke. I have seen people pound on the cup with a hammer or a sledgehammer and literally have spent hours trying to remove the cup from the passageway in the yoke. Again, the cup and the yoke have tended to fuse together because of the extraneous materials which have settled between the cup and the yoke and the chemical reaction between the cup and the yoke.
To the best of my knowledge and information, there is no readily available piece of equipment for pushing or forcing the cup out of the passageway in the yoke. The repair man must use a hammer or sledgehammer or other available equipment to pound on the cup to force it out of the passageway into the yoke.
Because of having worked with repairing universal joints and having to face the problem of removing the cup from the yoke before a new universal joint can be positioned in the yoke, I have developed this pusher tool.